My best golfing buddy keeps journals of all of our rounds. He calls me up occasionally and says “You won $3.00 from me back on July 5th 2000 when you birdied the 17th hole with a press going.” He has spiral notebooks full of all our matches, bets, rounds, highlights etc… He’s going to be getting The Ultimate Golf Journal as a gift from me.

The Ultimate Golf Journal

You know those books that have every bit of information about a baby from his favorite food, his shoe size when he was six months old, to a lock of hair from his first birthday? The Ultimate Golf Journal is the golfer’s equivalent to a baby book.

Lisa Bach thought of it all

The Ultimate Golf Journal’s author Lisa Bach did a spectacular job putting this book together. “TUGJ” has every nugget of information you’d ever want to document about yourself, your golf game, your gear, your rounds and more. She also sprinkles it with some great golf nuggets like some basic golf history, terminology, etiquette and some neat quotes (like the random golf quotes here). All of this great content is packaged in a beautifully elegant leather bound book which is around five by six inches wide.

The “My” Section

The first section you fill out in TUGJ (past the golf history and glossary) is what I call the “My” section. In this section you fill out My Game, My Top Five Lists, Favorite Courses, My Golf Buddies, Equipment Log, Equipment Wish List, Golf Bag Essentials and more.

Lisa puts in suggestions to spark your memory under headings like My Top-Five Golf Movies and My Top-Five Dream Courses. I particularly like how www.hookedongolfblog.com was one of the suggestions in the My Top-Five Most-Visited Golf Blogs (see pic below).

Logs

The Practice Log–if used as suggested–could be a big help and shave strokes off your game. You log swings of each club on the range and take 10 of them to evaluate your distances and capabilities. You find a median yardage out of the 10 swings to have confidence in picking the right club on the course.

The Golf Expense Log lets you track nine and eighteen hole round expenses, 19th hole expenses and miscellaneous other expenses. You may not want to fill these in if you don’t want your significant other getting on your case about your golf spending. If you’re like me, you don’t want the former significant other’s attorney seeing it…

The Golf Log is where you track your golf game on the course. You track scoring, fairways, greens in regulation, putts, expenses and more.

Handicap, Tournaments, 19th Hole, Golf Games

The last section of The Ultimate Golf Journal contains areas where you can fill out info about tournaments you’ve played in along with tournaments you’ve attended. There’s a section where you can write about your hole in one and your favorite rounds of golf along with where you like to celebrate your round or drink your sorrows away… the 19th hole.

Finally there’s a section which explains some golf games you can play like skins, match play, medal play, best ball, bingo bango bongo and several more.

Conclusion

The Ultimate Golf Journal is exactly that, ultimate. It’s a classy, elegant and well thought out golf record keeping journal. It’s formatted in a fun, clean and efficient way. TUGJ could be a real neat golf “time capsule” of your game which you can break out years down the road do see what gear you used, what your scores were and let your friends know you beat them out of $3.00 by making birdie on the last hole 3.5 years ago…

I have resisted recording stats on my golf over the years, but my 73-year old father, a life-long competitive golfer, still keeps track of GIR, putts, and chips. He really pays attention to the short game stuff, and swears that it helps him focus on his game and continue to improve. How’s that for life-long learning? After rebuilding his swing late last year, his scores and handicap ballooned, but he faithfully recorded all his scores unlike many of his peers who tend to leave out the high ones in order to retain their handicap. Result: he cleaned up in his men’s league. Maybe there is something to keeping track of one’s game.